Europe in the Age of The Cold War,1945–75619tary general of the Communist Party), Marshal Tito,
who held that office until his death in 1980. Multiparty
democracies were announced in Poland, Czechoslova-
kia, and Hungary, and Communist parties formed a
strong minority in each state. These democracies bore
the burdens of postwar austerity during 1945–47, and
each was so fragile that the Communist Party—backed
by the Red Army—could seize control of the govern-
ment. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary all fell to
such Stalinist coups in 1947–49.
A dramatic example of the Communist takeover in
Eastern Europe occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
Edouard Benesˇ, the prewar president of Czechoslovakia
and head of the government in exile during the war, re-
turned to Prague to lead a provisional government and
he was reelected president of the republic. Free parlia-
mentary elections in 1946 gave Czech Communists
38 percent of the vote and 114 seats; their four strongest
rivals (Catholic, democratic, and socialist parties) won
178 seats. This produced a coalition government with a
Communist prime minister, Klement Gottwald, plus
Communist management of key ministries such as the
Ministry of the Interior. The Gottwald government at-
tempted to nationalize several Czech industries, just
as socialists were doing in Britain and France; Gottwald
followed Soviet orders and refused to accept Western
aid, such as the Marshall Plan, for the rebuilding of
Czechoslovakia. These policies led to bitter disputes
with more conservative coalition partners, conflict that
Gottwald resolved in early 1948 by staging a coup
d’état, naming a Communist government, and blocking
elections. This coup included the mysterious death of
Czechoslovakia’s most prominent statesman, Foreign
Minister Jan Masaryk, whose fall from a high window
was labeled a suicide by the government; many other
non-Communists were purged from high office. Man-
aged elections then named Gottwald president, from
which position he solidified a Communist dictatorship.
A new Czech Constitution of 1948 proclaimed a Peo-
ple’s Democratic Republic on Soviet lines.
Similar coups created Communist states in Hun-
gary and Poland, where Communist-led provisional
governments and the presence of the Red Army facili-
tated the takeover. In Hungary, free elections and a se-
cret ballot in September 1945 gave the Communist
Party only 22 percent of the vote (the third highest
share) and 70 seats in parliament, far behind a Small-
holders Party (an anticommunist party) which garnered
57 percent of the vote and 245 seats. Charges of a con-
spiracy and “plotting against the occupying forces”
were brought against leaders of the new republic, who
were rapidly purged. This led to new elections in 1947
and a reported 95.6 percent vote for a Communist
coalition. A Soviet-inspired constitution of 1949 pro-
claimed Hungary a People’s Republic.
The Communist position in Poland was strong in
1945 because many non-Communist leaders had been
killed in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Two competing
governments-in-exile claimed to represent Poland, one
that spent the war in Moscow, another in London.
When the Red Army liberated Poland, Stalin installed
the pro-Soviet government in the Polish town of
Lublin, and it formed the basis of the postwar compro-
mise government. The Communist-led provisional gov-
ernment did not hold elections until 1947, when its
coalition received 80.1 percent of the vote and Western
protests arose that the elections had not been fair. In a
pattern similar to the events in Hungary and Czecho-
slovakia, the government nationalized land and indus-
tries, fought with the Catholic Church, punished
collaborators (more than one million people were dis-
enfranchised), adopted a new constitution, and purged
the party. Although other parties continued to exist,
the Communist government won a reported 99.8 per-
cent of the vote in the elections of 1952.
The creation of Communist dictatorships allied to
the Soviet Union provoked a strong reaction in the
West. Winston Churchill, a lifelong anti-Communist,
sounded the alarm against Soviet expansionism in a
speech delivered at a small college in Missouri in
March 1946. Churchill said that “an iron curtain has de-
scended across the Continent,” and the term Iron Curtain
became the Western world’s cold war symbol for the
border between the democratic West and the Commu-
nist East (see document 31.1).
The West first confronted Communist expansion-
ism in the Balkans. Greece had been a scene of intense
partisan fighting throughout the war. The Greek resis-
tance was predominantly composed of Communists
(similar to the situation in Yugoslavia and, to a slightly
lesser degree, France), whereas the government of
Greece was a monarchy. The conflict between the re-
sistance and the government produced sporadic fight-
ing in 1944–45 and degenerated into a Greek Civil War
(1946–49), widely seen as an attempted coup d’état by
Greek Communists. This civil war focused western at-
tention on the Balkans (including the vulnerability of
Turkey and the strait linking the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean). The geopolitical importance of this re-
gion plus growing western anxieties about Communist
expansionism led President Truman to announce aid to
Greece and Turkey in 1947. This policy became the